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Utilizing Lead Scoring

Organizations using lead scoring experience a 77% increase in lead generation ROI. This typically progresses to organizations spending more time with actual, qualified sales ready leads, while automating dynamic messaging to leads that are not yet ready for that personal touch. SharpSpring's lead scoring engine is configured based on information or activities that are important to your business, and not some out-of-the-box algorithm that makes assumptions on what should be important. This article will detail how to utilize lead scoring to help move you in the right direction on how to get the most out of the feature.

Lead Scores

The value in SharpSpring's lead scoring tool is the level of personalization a company can configure with it. What works as an indicator for one organization will not always work for another, so using a canned lead scoring method really does not hone in on the interactions that are uniquely important to you.

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When navigating to the lead score rules page, the first section of the page shows lead score ranges. This bar is valuable, as it allows for users to segment leads into groupings based on the score value. In addition, these segments come with a color categorization showing next to the lead to allow sales to quickly identify who is hot and who is not.

Setting Lead Scoring

Identify the target audience. If you have enabled personas, then you have likely spent a good amount of time on this already. If you are not laser focused on who you plan to market to, then lead scoring will be less-than-valuable.

Use custom attributes. Nested in the Fit section is Tracking. Use Tracking to create page rules and attribute point values based on uniquely important pages that the target audience may hit.

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Make media work for you. The Media section lets you attribute point scores based on the trackable assets created in the Media Center.

Make sure the Fit is perfect. If the Engagement section provides powerful personalization based on what leads do, the Fit section provides powerful personalization based on what leads say. Fit rules will be vastly different across organizations, as each has unique Key Performance Indicators for their sale and marketing teams on what qualifies a good lead. Spend some time on the Fit section, and again do not feel forced to add rules just to add rules here. Part of marketing is discovery, and as you uncover more indicators of sale, add those field values here to optimize the lead scoring tool.

Keep an eye on engagement. Engagement rules happen incrementally. Every time a lead has an engagement (such as a site visit), they will accumulate points. The point values in the Engagement section of the lead scoring tool have a lower cap than the Fit section, as the incremental nature of the scoring system leads will cause these numbers to become quite large over time.

Decremental Scoring

The majority of lead scoring utilizes positive scoring. This kind of scoring adds points to a score based on interaction.

Lead scoring allows for the opposite, as well. Fit and Engagement scores can be lowered based on how you want to segment leads.

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Consider decrementing the score for actions that represent leads who you do not want to target. As an example, you can set the Fit to subtract a number of points for leads that have specific email addresses.